Posted on November 5, 2014 at 3:41 pm
We are delighted to have an exclusive peek at a behind-the-scenes bonus clip from Garfield’s Holiday Collection. You can see Jim Davis drawing Garfield, star of the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world.
Posted on November 5, 2014 at 12:00 pm
I normally begin my interviews by asking for permission to record the conversation for my notes. But there was something eerily resonant about that routine request when I spoke to journalist Laura Poitras, director of the new documentary “Citizenfour,” about Edward Snowden, a contractor for the NSA who leaked massive amounts of confidential information about the pervasive and invasive intrusion of government spies into private exchanges by phone or email, even without any evidence of a threat to national security. Snowden first contacted Poitras, identifying himself only as “citizenfour.” They agreed to meet in Hong Kong, and most of the film takes place in his hotel room, as, joined by Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, they prepare for the release of the information and their stories about it. Even though we know what happened, it is tense, gripping, and mesmerizing to see those last few moments before Snowden’s face was on front pages and every newscast around the world.
Poitras agreed to be taped, noting that she had to assume she was always being recorded. I began by asking her about the limitations she felt as a filmmaker in making a visually dynamic film while being confined to just one room. “At first when I walked in, it was like ‘oh wow, this represents limitations here. We are still stuck in this room, the walls, there is so much white in the room, there is no space.’ That was my first impression but I think actually in the editing room I realized that there are ways in which it was really a blessing, that you get this kind of claustrophobic feeling that increases over the days and that time sort of stops and then slowly we feel the outside world coming in. So I do think in the end it turned out to be a positive thing. And then in terms of the dynamics that happened, it was pretty extraordinary for the building of events – from the first meeting to the publication to the global reaction, and then ultimately to Snowden leaving and going underground so I feel it was really interesting in the fact that is kind of awkward in this contained place. Honestly I was thinking there is a lot of white in this room. White is not easy to work with but I think in retrospect I am appreciative of that circumstance.”
I asked how to achieve the right balance between secrecy and privacy. “From what I’ve seen since 9/11, we’ve eroded civil liberties in the name of national security and I think that the government is becoming increasingly secretive about what it is doing. People know less and less and so for instance in terms of NSA surveillance, there is a public law, and then the government has the secret law or secret interpretation of that law. And I think that is really problematic. I don’t think that these kinds of policies or decisions should be made behind the scenes by people in secret with no public debates or inner knowledge. I think that is problematic and I think we’ve been drifting more and more into increasing secrecy in the government. It’s a problem. Elected officials are there on our behalf and we should know what our government is doing. I think is also false to say it is making us more secure because what we have right now is a situation where the U.S. is going around the world and making more enemies than it is making friends. We should re-think our policies. James Risen has a book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
She disputes the argument that the massive collection of data makes it less personally invasive. “I don’t think so at all, I think if you look at for instance journalists, if you’re collecting the call records of all journalists and you want to know who are their sources then you just query their phone records and so I think that it can be used in very invasive ways. I don’t think that because they collect so much it means that it is less invasive.” And she does not think that this level of surveillance would have prevented 9/11. “The CIA knew that there were people who came into this country and they didn’t pass the information to the FBI. So that is not example that they are swimming information it is that they didn’t communicate it to the people who could have prevented what happened.
Poitras is concerned that the depth and breadth of the information collected is itself a security risk. “There are people saying something like five million people have security clearances in this country. That is a lot of people. And there is more and more contracting out to other people who are not even working for the government. They are working for private companies and all have access to this amount of information.” I asked her to compare the intrusion of government with the apparently even more massive use of personal data by corporations like Google and Facebook. ” I think it is different. The power that the government has is very different than the power that the private company has. So I think there are actual big differences in terms of how this information can be used. But I think they people should also questions about how much information these companies have about us.” And, she pointed out, the government can use the information collected by Google and Facebook as well. “I also think there is a question of consent. When do you consent to share information and what is not consent.”
She respects the work of Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall in trying to establish more accountability and better policies, “but I also think that they could go further. They have immunity, so that they can come forward and let the public know what is happening if they have concerns about the scope and extent of these kind of programs. I’d love to see a real inquiry into the extent of surveillance and I think that those two senators are the forefront of pushing for that, but I urge them to do more.” And is Edward Snowden a hero? “That is not a question I engage in. I just find it a bit reductive and so I will pass on that question.”
Documentary filmmaking is now one of the most dynamic and compelling forms of journalism, so I asked Poitras what a movie can do in reporting that print cannot. Her answer was more about the timing issue than the format.
“They are totally different. They are both bound by by journalistic principles of making sure you do your fact checking and all that kind of stuff but it also needs to have more lasting meaning and raise more universal questions. Otherwise it is not going to be interesting. When I work on a news story, it has a certain impact but in a documentary, we were very clear in editing room our job is not to break news. That I can continue to report on this material and work on the news but the film needs to say something that is not just interesting for a certain amount of time but that will have lasting resonance and so for me, it is a question about individuals who take personal risks and that becomes more of a universal story. Yes, it is about NSA and NSA surveillance but it’s about human nature in different ways.”
Posted on November 5, 2014 at 8:55 am
Writer/director Christopher Nolan takes on literally cosmic issues with “Interstellar.” It is an ambitious, provocative, thoughtful, and highly entertaining film that deals with, well, pretty much everything, and, all things considered (believe me, ALL things are considered), it holds together very well.
It’s the near future and some blight has turned humans from progressive, curious, and optimistic to beaten down, hopeless, close to desperate. “We once looked up to the stars and dreamed,” says Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). “Now we look down to the dirt and worry.” Cooper was once an engineer at NASA. Now, like most people left, he is a farmer, struggling to grow crops in a world that has turned into a dustbowl, with plant species dying off until all that is left is corn. Cooper is a widower with two children, teenaged Tom and 10-year-old Murphy, and they live with his father-in-law (John Lithgow). The earth is not all that has been blighted. It is a post-enlightenment society scrambling for “caretaking,” with no intellectual aspirations or opportunities. Cooper’s wife died because medical technology and expertise that was once available no longer exists. And he is called into school because Murphy is in trouble for insisting that Americans once landed on the moon. That never happened, Murphy’s teacher explains a little impatiently. That was just a clever ruse to bankrupt the Soviet Union. The clear implication is that this revisionist history is itself a clever ruse to prevent young people from developing an interest in science that human society no longer believes has any value when the only possibility of survival is to return to the cultural norms of a thousand years ago, when most of human endeavor was devoted to making food. We do not know why the idea that science might be of aid in solving the food production crisis is no longer of interest. A comment by one person that greed created problems may be a clue.
Murphy insists that she is getting messages from a ghost who throws books off the shelf in her bedroom. When Cooper investigates, it appears to be an anomaly of some kind, a gravitational singularity, a message. The “ghost’s” message points to a location. When Cooper goes there, Murphy stows away in the car. It turns out to be a secret NASA facility led by Dr. Brand (Michael Caine). They have concluded that Earth can no longer sustain human life. They have sent out rocket probes to find an alternate planet that can sustain human life. Plan A is to be able to transport Earth’s inhabitants to a new location. The project is called Lazarus. Plan B, if no one alive can be saved, is to transport fertilized eggs to the new location and begin again, a new Genesis. They want Cooper to pilot the ship.
And this sets up the central conflict of the story. It is only secondarily about whether humans can, will, or should continue as a species and culture. The primary concern is the relationship between Cooper and Murphy. He wants more than anything in the world to stay with her and watch her grow up. But he knows his participation is critical to the mission — no one else going has ever actually flown before — and if the mission fails, Murphy’s generation will be the last. In a wrenching scene, Cooper has to leave while Murphy is furious and hurt. He promises he will come back. Parent-child relationships and especially promises broken and kept, echo throughout the storyline.
Dr. Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) is on the crew and the trip into space leads to some mind-bending conversations about cosmology, including wormholes, black holes, and why an hour on one planet can translate into seven years for the occupants of the spaceship circulating above. The visual effects (all built or “practical” effects, no digital/green screen) are stunning.
The storyline also provides an opportunity for extremely complex and difficult moral choices, as the crew has to make decisions based on very limited information and even more limited time. The broad sweep of themes means that some choices work better than others. The ending seems rushed and not entirely thought through. Cutting back and forth between scenes in outer space and back on earth during one passage goes on too long, and one mention of Dylan Thomas’ famous poem would be plenty. A detour involving an unbilled actor with an almost-unforgivably on-the-nose character name is particularly poorly conceived. But even that scene is so visually striking that it barely registers as a diversion. And overall, the film’s willingness to place the biggest questions in the grand sweep of the universe is absorbing and it is impossible not to be moved by it.
Parents should know that this film includes themes of environmental devastation and potential human extinction, sci-fi-style peril and violence, sad deaths of parents and children, attempted murder, characters injured and killed, and a few bad words.
Family discussion: Why did the school insist that the moon landing was faked and what does that tell us about this society? What should the crew have considered in deciding which planet to try?
If you like this, try: “2001,” “Silent Running,” and “Inception”
Posted on November 4, 2014 at 7:00 am
A Belle for Christmas
I asked him to describe Elliot as if if was a friend. “He loves his grandma, he loves hanging with his friend Malcolm, he has a crush on a girl on the other street and he is very outgoing and he loves his dad, you can kind of tell that. And if he needs to he can come with some kind of plans and pranks and stuff.” He said the adults were as good as the children at remembering their lines. “You know we had some fumbles in our lines ever so often. Everybody does but I don’t know I think a little bit of both. Maybe kids are better because they have got that fresh mind.” He loved the two dogs that played Belle. “She was the sweetest thing in the world, she was so cute and fluffy. Two dogs actually. I used both of them. I don’t think I’d ever seen a cream colored shepherd. And when I first saw both of them, I was like ‘Oh my gosh!’ They were like the snow, they were so cute and I guess from the first time when all the kids and the grownups met the dogs it was like, ‘Oh yes this is going to be awesome.'”
The dogs’ trainer helped make sure that Belle performed on cue. “The part in the movie in the beginning where the dog comes out of the lady’s arms and comes over towards me and I pick her up — they actually put some dog treats, I can’t remember if it was on my boots or right next to my boot. So the dog would come over and start nibbling on that and I would pick her up. She actually really did what she was told to do.”
In the film, Elliot and Phoebe can tell right away that Dani is not to be trusted. I asked Jet how they figured it out. “Kids can kind of like see that from like a mile away. We could tell she didn’t care about us – she just cares about our dad. So basically when that happens they are just like…’Okay, this is war.'”
He enjoyed hanging out with the other kids in the cast between film set-ups. “We hang, we tell jokes. In the trailer all the kids had we had bunk beds. Four kids so four bunk beds. So me and my friend Connor we got the top bunks then the girls were on the bottom ones but we every so often, we’d go on everybody else bed. Ee just laughed and had fun. Everybody on the set knew right away ‘This set is going to be really fun. That’s what this is.'”
When he’s not working or in school, Jet likes movies about basketball and soccer. He enjoys the baseball classic “The Sandlot,” too. He likes books about sports as well, and recently read a book about Satchel Paige. He really enjoys acting, but his favorite thing about making a movie is asking questions about pretty much everything. “Why are you putting this right here?” “What’s this lens going to do?” He also enjoyed “hanging with Dean and Kristy” and being reunited with Connor Berry and Avary J. Anderson, who play his friends in the film, and have appeared with him before. “Every time I would see Dean he would always do this trick. It’s that trick which where he is like ‘Oh is that something on your shirt?’ and then he would bang you on the nose and even till this day he will do it to me like three times when I see him. Every single time I will fall for it. I need to have a buzzer that says, ‘Don’t do it!’ but every time I’m like ‘urrrh!’ He’s hilarious.”
And Jet says the best advice he ever got about acting is “just don’t worry about it if you make mistakes. Just have fun with it and go with the flow and if you feel something, go with it and do it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB3Dfho3wYI
Posted on November 3, 2014 at 8:00 am
Erik Estrada and Fred Willard provide two of the most distinctive voices in Disney’s Planes Fire and Rescue
Estrada plays a version of himself, or at least himself as a helicopter inspired by his most iconic character, Ponch from the television series CHiPs
Estrada got to see a picture of his character before he recorded the voice. But it was not hard for him to get back into Ponch mode. “I didn’t have to psyche too much because I am Ponch. Originally when I auditioned for Ponch, he was an Italian American cop, very aggressive, very gung-ho, very gregarious and I have a lot of that in my personal attitude but when I got them I made him a Latin American. I just drew on my background and drew on my insides and basically Ponch was me and I was Ponch. My character in this movie is a bit aggressive, too. He’d call a car ‘punk’ and of course my partner says, ‘Calm down, calm down,’ just like Larry Wilcox would have done on our show.” Estrada especially enjoyed attending the premiere of the film, with a special dinner for the performers, because it was the first chance he had to be with the other actors. “It was great to see all the other planes and trucks, all the characters, it was great. “I got to see everybody I had not seen in a long time. People that I knew, like Stacey Keach who, I had done The New Centurions with back in ‘71, and Ed Harris who has done an episode of CHiPS and he didn’t know how to ride a bike and I gave him a real quick know-how. That was kind of nice seeing him again.” Estrada says he knows why everyone loves stories about cars and planes and trains: “Because we all started out in strollers. We started out in strollers, and the first thing we notice is the wheel. They see that first before they see anything else. And so we relate to it and we liked them little cars, we liked the colours, we liked to make noise and we like them – and if you see them in a movie, then you really want to get them.”
Fred Willard’s character is an important government official, an SUV who is the Secretary of the Interior. “Very political, yes. Very, very political,” he said, “He’s kind of conservative, concerned with his responsibility. I kind of went for the generic official, with the grey suit you see in all these shots of Congress and the Senate, always making very well pre-planned statements and being very aware of his public image and not suffering any stupidity from underlings. He just kind of considered John Michael Higgins’ character as kind of an annoyance. He had to handle him diplomatically but still feeling a little superior to him. I was always fascinated with those kinds of people. I worked in an office in New York for three years when I first started and I had a lot of bosses who were very stuffy, with nonsensical rules and I was always coming in late in the morning and I had to look at these directives about punctuality, and I was kind of secretly amused by some of those characters.”
Willard said, “I like to do voice things because when you see what you portray on the screen, it is not me so I am relaxed, I don’t say ‘how do I look like that at that day, what did I do with my hair, why was I standing this way,’ anything like that. So I usually enjoy that more than seeing myself live on screen. You have to depend a hundred per cent on your voice, so it is a lot easier in some ways and it is more of a challenge, too. Sometimes they put all those electrodes on you and as you move they film your movement, and I’ve done it where they filmed your face and that is strange too, but you still don’t look like yourself.” He recorded alone at first, but then they had him come back to record with his frequent co-star in the Christopher Guest films, John Michael Higgins. “They wanted us to get together to do our lines, maybe come up with some new lines or some interplay. ” Working on the film reminded him of the toys he loves as a kid. “I just kind of think back to my own childhood. I had little toy trucks and cars, and I was into little toy soldiers, I remember, but I was very fascinated with airplanes. When we went into the studio and I saw the little models of all the planes. I just wanted to grab a couple and stick them in my pocket and bring them home. It was fascinating. But here it is pocket size and you’re kind of in charge of it and that gives you a feeling of power.”
I asked him for the best advice he ever got about acting. “To know your lines – not just know your lines but be on top of them so they come second nature. And then step into whatever character you are. And if you’re improvising, just try to stay in the scene and move the scene forward.”
Both Willard and Estrada said they’re hoping for a third “Planes” movie. If so, I hope I get to talk to them again.
